Estudios Irlandeses , Number 3, 2008, pp. 101-112 ______AEDEI

Fathers in a Coma: Father-Son Relationships in Neil Jordan’s Fiction

Samuele Grassi University of Florence, Italy

Copyright (c) 2008 by Samuele Grassi. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged for access.

Abstract. This paper will analyze father-son relationships in some of Neil Jordan’s novels and short stories. His writing often deals with this theme, as well as with the gap between old and young generations. His works are often built around the contrast between tradition and modernity, such as de Valera’s idealised concept of Nation and contemporary, ‘global’ Ireland. Thus following a consistent trend in contemporary Irish literature, Jordan develops new narratives of the Nation. What do fathers do? What do sons do? How do fathers respond to their sons’ actions and behaviours, and vice versa? These questions will be addressed and, possibly, be answered. In Neil Jordan’s work, father-son struggles have their counterpart in the process of the revision of ideologies and norms of tradition (patriarchy and the Catholic Church). At the same time, they are accompanied by a strong feeling of belonging to Ireland as a Nation. Key Words. Father, son, Nation, de Valera, ghost, identity, roles.

Resumen. El artículo analizará las relaciones padre-hijo en algunas novelas y relatos de Neil Jordan. Su obra a menudo trata este tema, así como la distancia entre generaciones. Sus obras están construídas a menudo en torno al contraste entre tradición y modernidad, el concepto idealizado de la Nación propagado por de Valera y la Irlanda ‘global’ del presente. En sintonía con una arraigada tendencia de la literature irlandesa contemporánea, Jordan crea nuevas narrativas de la Nación. ¿Qué hacen los padres? ¿Qué hacen los hijos? ¿Cómo responden los padres a las acciones y comportamientos de sus hijos, y viceversa? Tales preguntas serán formuladas, y posiblemente respuestas. En la obra de Neil Jordan, las luchas padre-hijo tienen su contrapunto en el proceso de revisión d ideologías y normas tradicionales (patriarcado e Iglesia Católica). Al mismo tiempo, van acompañadas por un fuerte sentimiento de pertenencia a Irlanda como Nación. Palabras clave. Padre, hijo, Nación, de Valera, fanstasma, identidad, roles.

During a conference in Munich in 1988 on the Irish contemporary authors, haunted by de Irish cultural panorama, Richard Kearney Valera’s ghost, have developed new narratives asserted that: “Yes, we have an identity crisis of the Nation in order both to re-gain in the South. But at least we are trying to work possession of the concept of Irishness and of it out in our literature” (Kearney 1988b: 213). their own relationship with Ireland’s colonial Kearney also pointed out that Ireland’s past and national history. The revision of “transitional crisis” must be viewed as a traditional tropes and the shaping of alternative consequence of the country’s move to representations of individual and national globalisation, and this implied a reassessment identities lead to the deconstruction of of its national identity (Kearney 1988a: 84). stereotypes and ‘typically Irish’ re-workings of subjects and narrations silenced so far. It is in ______ISSN 1699-311X 102 these borderline areas where everything new – 1990). Neil Jordan’s work moves freely within new forms of representation, new identities – is these ambiguous spaces, for it tends towards defined according to its obsessive relation with the indefinableness of all representations, in a the past that Neil Jordan’s work has its origins. never-ending process of revision of the A novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and possibilities of fiction. Kevin Rockett has director, Neil Jordan is perhaps the leading appropriately defined certain tendencies in exponent of what Gerry Smyth has defined as Jordan’s fiction as a “trope of mutability”, that the “Pan Celtic Revival” in Irish culture over is to say the last three decades (Smyth 1997: 175). (…) notions around appearance, reality and At a superficial level, Jordan’s techniques ‘unreality’, or the irrational; the psycho-sexual are similar to Flann O’Brien, Aidan Higgins dynamics of the family, but most especially around and John Banville’s postmodern the young male and the oedipal triangulation of deconstruction of narrative language, desire; the interrelationship of private and public; something which Kearney has referred to as a the (im)possibility of transformation and the “counter-tradition” in Irish contemporary blurring of categories other than in negative terms; literature (see Kearney 1988c). These authors an enjoyment of the sensual, of fantasy and the impossible made possible (E and K Rockett 2003: fluctuate in a mid-position between Modernism 1). and revivalism, a position which Kearney has called “mediational Modernism … a collage of Father-son relationships are pivotal to the modern and traditional motifs, … It may be narrative development in many of Neil termed post-modern to the extent that it Jordan’s texts (that is, the novels, especially borrows freely from the idioms of both The Past, The Dream of a Beast and Sunrise modernity and tradition, one moment with Sea Monster, and some of the short stories endorsing a deconstruction of tradition, another in Night in Tunisia). It may be seen how the reinventing and rewriting the stories of the past illuminating way in which father-son struggles transmitted by cultural memory” (Kearney are treated is linked to a common trend in Irish 1988c: 14). Neil Jordan’s works, for instance, cultural debate – which had its peak in the very often deal with the theme of father and 1990s – in which tradition is neither fully son relationships set in the broader, rejected, nor yet considered thoroughly metaphorical context of an attempt to leave reliable. In a time when Irish culture has been behind the tradition established by Irish undergoing a radical re-structuring of its ‘literary fathers’. His revision of traditional foundations, Jordan’s work shows an urge for motifs and attitudes is motivated by the revision and invention of alternative deconstruction of the norms and stereotypes of representations of the narratives of the Nation. both patriarchy and the Catholic Church, which This is relevant for the study of contemporary are currently being replaced by new identities Irish culture since his works belong to a that purport to cross boundaries as a means to genuinely post-modern (Irish) counter-tradition undermine all stereotypes (of gender, of race, which focuses on transitional spaces, shifting and of political ideals). A recurring theme in deliberately across the United States and Jordan’s fiction is also the rewriting of Irish Europe, Ireland and England. myths of the Nation and an exploration of how Neil Jordan’s recent film production has these myths impinge upon people’s lives and over-shadowed his career as a writer and has behaviour. perhaps distanced his interest in father-son and Some recent studies on Irish literature have other traditional motifs and themes, as well as drawn a comparison between Neil Jordan’s to issues of the Nation, which characterise his point of view and Homi Bhabha’s notion of most accomplished works to date. However, third space (see Kearney, Smyth and Hopper). below this choice there may lie his desire to For Bhabha, hybridity does not account for the leave the haunting ghost of the Nation’s past possibility “to trace two original moments behind once and for all; it is also possible that from which a third one emerges, [but] (…) is Rockett’s definition of ‘trope of mutability’ the ‘third space’ which enables other positions could again provide an explanation, for it gives to emerge. This third space displaces the an eloquent judgment on Jordan’s whole histories that constitute it, and sets up new production. The analysis of a series of works in structures of authority, new political initiatives, which the father-son struggles reach their which are inadequately understood through climax will demonstrate how such an ‘Irish’ received wisdom” (Bhabha in Rutherford issue is still at the core of contemporary Irish 103

literature. In spite of Ireland’s move to The ordinariness of the characters is globalisation and its recent economic-social juxtaposed with references to the fathers of the developments, Jordan and most of his Nation and the characters’ relationship with contemporaries share the same urge to mould their own past. Jordan’s writing habitually ever-changing ideas of the Nation into their draws on events and personae from the history fiction, an urge which draws consistently on of Ireland. Eamon de Valera, for instance (in their revaluation of not only Ireland’s, but also the novel, a friend of Una’s), is portrayed as of their own past. the national father par excellence. Here, he A national myth of origins: The Past becomes “the gaunt schoolmaster … his unlikely profile on the history of this place as In his analysis of the epistemological crisis in surely as South American dictators stick theirs post-modern Irish fiction, Neil Murphy has on coins and postage stamps” (50) (this is pointed out that, as much as Banville and probably an intrusion by the writer himself, Higgins, Neil Jordan responds to the lesson who questioned de Valera’s presumed right to taught by Modernism, bringing his readers be the father of his Nation/Ireland in his 1996 towards fictional worlds where human film, Michael Collins). Rene’s father is always knowledge and experience are questioned evoked in the novel by his Free State Uniform. (Murphy 2004: 3-4). Neil Jordan’s first novel, 1 Having been killed during the Booterstown The Past (1980) investigates the search for Seafront – where the Free State’s Minister of origins through a “richly metaphorical Justice, Kevin O’Higgins, was murdered by meditation on the interwoven concepts of IRA militants avenging some fellow nation and narration in Ireland” (Hopper 2001: republicans –, his death reminds readers of the 180). The unnamed protagonist is driven by the way political violence breaks powerfully into urge to unravel the truth about his parents’ the private sphere. In this novel, the lives. In order to reach his purpose, he uses all private/public interaction is further stressed that remains of his mother Rene, her pictures, through the failed marriage of Michael and and the memories of her longtime childood Una. James Vance, in a similar way, is friend, Lili, an actress like her, and Father characterised with his “sympathies Republican, Beausang. The repeated use of “I imagine” his background Protestant. He has entered a from the very beginning of the novel, however, Catholic marriage and his wife has not long is a prelude to the disappointment of his ago died, having left him a son christened expectations. Two key male characters in the Luke.” (103). Religion and political novel, James and Luke Vance (themselves commitment, it may be inferred, are dominant father and son), complicate the narrative even narratives written in the Nation’s as well in further. Every attempt at the truth is destined to individuals’ histories. Kathleen Gallagher be lost in the “musk of generation” (309) at the Winarski claimed that Jordan in his films end of the novel. The plot raises the question extends his investigation of traditional Irish of exile by introducing a portrait of Rene’s tropes, and shows that parents’, Una and Michael, who have to go to England to give birth to their “love-child” (8) (…) he is not intimidated by Irish tradition. Rather, Jordan explores Irish literature and conceived outside the bonds of marriage. Thus, culture as an artist who challenges tradition to they realize that they are “Irish, (…) carrying express and to enrich his own vision, which is their cases, (…) whispering the confidence that rooted in his past, but headed toward a future they too are transplants to this imperial soil» that will, by its nature, push the artist beyond all (10). But they were also outsiders in Ireland, boundaries. For Jordan stretching the strangers in their own land, as there was no boundaries of tradition means liberating his escape from the traditional family union as fiction – breathing new life into Ireland’s stories sanctioned by the Catholic Church’s moral of family and nation through film and its ability principles. Interestingly enough, Ireland here to create intricate and subtle textures of becomes “that country where there is only characterisation and feeling. (Winarski 1999: 98) rumour and everybody is related” (18). ______Both Lili and Father Beausang recall the 1. The Past, John Murray, London 2005: all protagonist’s parents’ hidden past. It is Lili bibliographical references in square brackets refer who helps Rene free herself from the burden of to this edition. the Catholic education she has been subjected 104

to by her mother, Una; it was also through power of the arts evoked in the narrated events Lili that Rene had discovered her sexual (painting, photography and acting). In these instincts, “And feeling Lili’s hand (…) for instances, the narrator’s point of view shifts to such is the feeling welling inside you, you reveal a continuum between father and son. A suspect it would fill a whole glass” (70) case in point is old Vance’s rapture in front of leading her to pass “from the age of innocence his canvas “as if the brush is pulling his hand”, to the age of reason” (69). Father Beausang is with the strokes introducing the reader to James’s best friend and little Luke’s thoughtful James and Luke walking together (“His son mentor. Father and son live together with was up the Head and his own son beyond him, James’s father, an elderly painter – just like near the crest”). This anticipates James’s Jordan’s mother – as unable to break away realization of the passing of time and of the sea from the memories of an impossible vision of of experience, as vast an ocean as that which the past as he is from his painting. Beausang is he surveys with his son from the top of the an ordinary local priest, himself a figuration of crest: “death was not just like that sea, it was the male-oriented gender norms of the Catholic that sea and the only purpose of that sea was to Church. remind him of his death” (137-8). Similarly, Beausang, above all, is unable to cope with when James exhorts his son at the end of the personal relationships of any kind outside of novel not to repeat the same mistakes he has his microcosm/the parish. His interest in the made, this takes place while old Vance dreams Vances may then be read as earnest of them both as he sits by his canvas: commitment only because there is no woman You must succeed where I failed. (…) You are in the Vance household fulfilling the my beloved son, he says, you must be traditional role of mother2. At a certain everything I am not. But you made me, Luke moment in the narrative, Beausang goes so far says, turning his face around to the light. Luke as to realise that “I loved that house (…) and shows the cut-out square of print to the old man, its three generations of males and perhaps it who proclaims it a masterful knee. I won’t be was the fact that there was no woman there that with you much longer, the old man says, enabled me to call so often (…) Was it this we standing in the doorway. For a little while, then I won’t be with you. You are my father, James shared, I wonder, this absence of femininity, says, you will always be with us. You made me. because it often seemed that all our discussions You made me, says Luke, turning again from in that sagging house concerned an absence the light. The old man shuffles back upstairs to which all three of them suspected might one where he mixes his pigments. Up there he day be filled” (187-8). Here may be seen not dreams of them both, with his shock of white only evidence of the frankness of his hair. (172-3) attachment to that family but also hints of his As the protagonist is inspecting his father’s veiled homosexual impulses. and his father’s father’s house, the memories of In some parts of the novel the motif of the past are suddenly transformed into a father-son relationships is juxtaposed with a compulsive quest for an identity – his own – symbolic presence of fathers in a more general and what his eyes see is exactly what his nose sense, a haunting presence influenced by the smells and his inner self cannot resist [“He ______goes upstairs and urinates in the bowl, 2. Although the character of Father Beausang is not surrounded by the odour of fathers, of the slow questioned further in the novel, there is a rather drip across the years, of inheritance, colouring significant scene later on in which hints are given and temper, from father to son and father to about his assumed homosexuality: “The yellow son.” (239)]. chair bumped to a halt and I was thrown forward Another association is made between the into his lap. He held me for a moment by the myth of the individual and the myth of the shoulders and smiled. I could see the moisture Nation as the narrative setting shifts to gathering at the corner of each eye.” (213), which may represent a justification for the priest’s odd Lisdoonvarna. Jordan enhances the attachment to the males of the Vance family. Also, metaphorical connotations of this episode by when James visits his home his eyes are caught by a interposing a return to the origins of the “lady (…) strangely male in her angular ‘national father’, de Valera, (“Dev (…) the movements” (263). References to Catholic Church father of us all”, as Lily says). Looking for morals are frequently questioned by the author in “that elusive elixir of abstentation politics and his works. national health” (286), de Valera expects to 105 receive from the holy waters that “extraordinary in his first novel is something Jordan has more power” (300) necessary to be a good leader of a recently rejected, as if to confess that he has developing nation. This sort of parallel structure outgrown the topic and its ramifications. is a recurring device in most of Neil Jordan’s Impossible Fathers/Horrible Beasts: The fiction/works. Generally speaking, they pertain to Dream of a Beast a trend in contemporary Irish literature according to which the re-appropriation of the past as a Although Neil Jordan’s second novel deals category is a necessary step towards the with issues of fathers much in the same way as development of new narratives of the Nation. the other novels considered in this study, there Luke Gibbons has claimed that the same process are some aspects in it which provide interesting can also be discerned in contemporary Irish and relevant variations; first, this novel cinema. And this would prove that the two forms features a daughter; and, the protagonist is of art share the same purposes, in contrast to the haunted not by his own relationship with his frequent conception that they are two different father, but by his childood memories of his means of representation. Gibbons concludes that mother. The theme of the struggle father-son, as a result, overlaps with veiled references to (…) what is needed here is not less, but more an incestuous and to an oedipal relationship, attention to literature and film, for writers and though neither of the two is fully explicit film-makers in Ireland have already taken it anywhere in the novel. upon themselves to question (…) omniscient or 3 over-arching narratives. Some of the most The Dream of a Beast (1983) can be viewed distinctive – and, it could be argued, influential as an Irish investigation of the fantastic and – strands in Irish fiction have sought to pre- gothic genres. The plot follows the empt the very possibility of the narrative transformation of the protagonist into a beast. coherence by introducing into fiction precisely The definition used by Murphy to refer to the contingency of history – the chance event, Jordan’s style seems fairly appropriate. He has the accidental detail, the unexpected encounter, spoken of him as a writer who frequently the irrelevant aside (Gibbons 2003: 73). infuses his works with a genuine confusion of In a 1982 interview, Neil Jordan ascribed the “Kafkesque dream visions with Blakean interest that led him to write The Past to his prophetic echoes” (Murphy 2004: 20). recollection of the day of de Valera’s funeral: In the beginning, a transformation takes place in the protagonist’s surroundings, and he It was an extraordinary sight because it seemed realises he is slowly being rejected by society to me that people didn’t know how they should respond to this event. (…) And it seemed to me [“Everyone was noticing things, remarking on that it called for some response, it seemed to be things around them, but for me it was critical. an event that should gather a nation around it, Change and decay seemed to be the condition” like the death of Churchill in England or (1)]. The protagonist’s transformation mirrors something as stupid as that. It seemed to that of Dublin, a city recognisable only through symbolise to me the fact that Irish identity and references to the names of the streets, and the Irish consciousness was one of question and where the memory of an idealised past when problems, not one of a firm knowledge of who things used to be different is pervasive: “… and what we are. (…) and it also struck me that those buildings of concrete and glass that had our inheritance is one of huge question marks come to litter the city, half-finished. (…) all the time. (…) I suppose I was just wondering if human beings lose their memory of the past, Spanning the wall behind was a miniature of whatever the significance it has for them. (…) the city as it once had been.” (87). It is now a all the influence that affects you seems to have violent place, with soldiers standing at every nothing to do with a past that was seething with street corner. The way the city is portrayed is a problems and was perhaps even a nut that reflection of how moral and social couldn’t be cracked (Tóibín 1982: 16-7). constrictions affect the development of an This would confirm the way Irish individual identity. Since, in this novel, the contemporary authors share the obsession for public sphere is the mirror of the private de Valera’s ghost and the urge to confer sphere, and vice versa, the pain suffered by the thoroughly new interpretations to their own and their nation’s past. As will be highlighted ______later in this study, autobiography plays a 3. The Dream of a Beast, Chatto & Windus, London fundamental role in most of Neil Jordan’s 1983: all bibliographical references in square fiction. The obsession with the past as revealed brackets refer to this edition. 106 protagonist is also due to the failure of his in life. And it will only happen in his dreams, marriage to Marianne and his inability to in one of which Matilde has grown up and perform the traditional role of father for his admits that she is in love with him. daughter, Matilde. In his commentary on The The beast’s pain is lessened by his encounter Company of Wolves (Jordan’s 1984 adaptation with the “boy” – he, too, exiled, and a victim of Angela Carter’s short story), Kevin Rockett of violence – who also considers the beast’s argued that in both that film and The Dream of way of appearing as a way of displaying a a Beast the author tries to underline the fact notion of truth. Lori Rogers has referred to this that “social fictions are (…) figured as subtle as the “body-secret”, which allows for a forms of ideological entrapment”. According to reading of the novel in terms of the truth being Rockett, the novel is a meditation “about the hidden in the deconstructive power of the possibility of transformation and finding secrets themselves. Rogers has also argued that acceptance and love, even within the Politics, race, sexuality and national identities constraints of the family (…) which draws on a are merely social constructs, designed to be number of issues – around the body, the divisive, which, as Jordan states, impinge on the family, alienation, transformation, difference, journey from seemin reality (the loathsome love”. Similarly, in the film The Miracle surface) to seeming unreality (the joy of inner (1991), “the father is seen to fear that he cannot reality). (…) If one’s identity is performance live up to the requirements demanded by his even to oneself, Jordan is fully negating biology family” (Rockett 2003: 45-56). The violence in as intrinsic to the self at the same time that he sets up physiological change and internal body- Dublin has its counterpart in the violence secrets as prerequisites for truth (Rogers 1997: implicit in the domestic sphere, since the beast 53-4). is betrayed by his wife who accuses him of incest. In this way, Marianne represents a While for the protagonist issues of violence deconstruction of the stereotype of women as and social constrictions (the performing of the protectors of the home and family cohesion. It traditional role of father, the soldiers on duty in is she who has fun with their friends, and who Dublin) influence the shaping of his individual sends her husband away. The marriage is identity, and he responds to them by changing definitely over when she sends him away from into a beast, for the “boy”, on the other hand, the family home: violence is a product of his relationship with his father, who has him working hard all day Don’t come up, she pleaded, Matilde’s not and all night [“He was goaded on by shouts, asleep. Please, my darling, I said, but the words coarse and violent. Then a dark-skinned figure sounded like heavy drops of oil, don’t be afraid. I want to kiss her goodnight. I would have said in dungarees appeared, shovelled furiously more but I could feel her fear rush down the with him for a moment, sent him spinning stairs towards me like a wall of water. I could towards the furnace with a blow and left again, by no means blame her, but that fear served to admonishing him to work faster” (76)]. goad me even more. (…) Say goodnight from According to what has been said so far, it is the doorway, she said. (…) I heard no reply. I possible to read the water at the end of the drew as quiet and deep a breath as I could and novel as a metaphor for the beast’s attempt to began again. Before I reached the first return to his mother’s womb. No explicit consonant, however, I felt a blow from behind. mention of a mother-son relationship is made The metallic pikes scraped me like a claw, I fell in the novel. But the protagonist does meet his headlong, I heard a door slam and a key turn in a lock with a short reverberant click. (46-7) mother twice in Dublin, though he neither greets her nor talks to her, for he is stuck in the Once again, the theme of exile functions as a memories of what has been lost forever and means to escape gender roles and conventions, cannot be recovered: “My weekly visits had for the beast is also aware that “what is seen of become an embarrassment. (…) I thought of him by others is not what he knows to be the how she must have missed me. In one full truth but a mask”. It is not a coincidence, then, moment I felt how much I had missed her. My that his transformation into a beast is now longing to touch her seemed to fill the carriage completed: “I gathered myself on to all fours. like a soaking cloud, like steam.” (24). Rockett (…) I raised my weighty palm to that door and has focused on this element in his analysis of gouged some words on the cedar. Goodbye.” the sea imagery in some of Neil Jordan’s (56-7). All that is left to him is the chance to works. The sea represents a pre-natal resume his relationship with his daughter later condition, in that “To varying degrees, water 107 and seaside are treated as the mise-en-scene of In Sunrise with Sea Monster, the silence is desire and sexual liberation, so that it becomes twofold – on the one hand, it reveals an a metaphor for the ultimate desire, which is to impossible relationship, an impossible return to the maternal waters and total affection which is always associated, in plenitude” (E. and K. Rockett 2003: 109). The Donal’s mind, with the positive memory of his end of the novel is a case in point. Through the father and himself while out fishing5; when suppression of the possibility of an incestuous silence was more important than any speech. relationship with his daughter, and an As Donal recounts to his prison officers, “This unnameable bond with his mother, the beast practice to be indulged in at arbitrary intervals can recuperate his pre-natal state and so end his with a familiar who may relish the sense of spiritual wandering. relative peace it brings, the main pleasure, I The nature of betrayal: Sunrise with Sea might add, being in the silence brought about Monster by the absence of the need for speech.»” (63). On the other hand, Donal’s childhood An enduring father-son struggle and the memories trouble him, since they remind him ways and means by which it both affects and of his mother’s death. They also remind him of mirrors political divisions are the main theme Rose, and she becomes the pretext for the of Jordan’s most accomplished novel, Sunrise 4 motif of father-son betrayal throughout the with Sea Monster . Hedwig Schwall places the novel. Father and son both fall in love with her, text in a “‘Robinsonian’ trend in Irish and every ‘family scene’ is marked by the literature”, a mixture of historical novel and silence among the three of them [“the silence Bildungsroman which can also be found in that seemed the natural state of things Roddy Doyle’s A Star Called Henry (1999), continued. / I maintained my silence. / (…) Glenn Patterson’s Burning Your Own (1988), then walked in silence with him home.” (53)]. Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996) The plot is set at the time of World War II and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996) and the conflicts between Republicans and (Schwall 2002: 31). Jordan’s third novel Free State supporters in Ireland. Donal Gore, a consists of a set of sub-textual relations which Republican/IRA sympathizer, joins the cause complicate the father-son relationship and of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War but is place it in the context of a rewriting of soon arrested and jailed6 . He and his traditional Irish myths. Once again, the sea generation of rebellious sons consider every metaphor is dealt with. The sea is, primarily, action as a means to betray the memory of where the protagonist, Donal Gore, can regain ‘fathers’: “I came here because of all courses possession of his own past, marked by his of action I could have taken it was the only one mother’s death when he was a child (“if she I knew with certainty that my father would was gone anywhere it was into that sea” (12)). have disapproved of.” (19). On the other hand, the sea substitutes the This novel also highlights the special role silence that characterises Donal’s relationship given to music in Jordan’s work (see Angel, with his father, Sam. Nature and the effects of Night in Tunisia, The Miracle). In the novel silence have been focused on by Bernard there is a triangular relationship between Cardin in his recent study on the father-son Donal, Sam and Rose, Donal’s piano teacher. relationship in some important contemporary The piano is all that is left to Donal of his Irish novels. As Cardin points out, silence in mother. In the same way Sam seems to fall in Irish literature dates back to Joyce’s Dubliners ______where it is seen as “une forme de résistance (…) combat silencieux, signe d’insoumission à 5. Father and son sharing the pleasures of fishing together as the only moment in which all conflicts la volonté paternelle. C’est comme si le père are resolved is also a theme in Brian Friel’s avait tellement monopolisé la parole qu’il Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). n’arrivait plus à la transmettre” (Cardin 2005: 78). 6. The Spanish Civil War features also in Colm Tóibín’s The South (1990). In his The Heather ______Blazing (1992), moreover, the protagonist’s father 4. Sunrise with Sea Monster, Bloomsbury is paralysed after a stroke, just like Samuel Gore. Publishing, London/New York 2004: all The father in Tóibín’s novel is also a public bibliographical references in square brackets refer character, which may lead one to think that, as in to this edition. Jordan’s novel, a double mutilation takes place.

108 love with Rose only because she plays the of mind – since his father is no longer able to same tunes his wife used to play. Samuel Gore speak, Donal no longer suffers from the silence is a typical drunken father; he is unable to cope between them. The father’s “castration”, as with life and running a family unless he has by Cardin has called it, deprives him of the his side a woman performing the traditional threatening power he formerly exercised upon role of mother – the figure of Mother Ireland Donal. This event, Cardin underlines, relates being her cultural projection – [“We’ll make back to a ‘tradition’ of castrated fathers in Irish do, he said, won’t we? And there was that hint literature represented most clearly in some of uncertainty in his voice, as if maybe we works of Synge, O’Casey, Joyce and Beckett: wouldn’t. We will, I said and felt resentful at Tout lien symbolique est impossible car un lien being the one who must provide the diabolique s’interpose. C’est précisément parce reassurance.” (11)]. Furthermore, the contrast qu’en raison de sa tétraplégie, Samuel Gore ne between Spain and Ireland mirrors the father- peut plus jouer son rôle d’interdicteur, parce son divisions. The latter conflict also resembles qu’il ressent chez son fils de désir de le tuer et the juxtaposition of Ireland and England as parce qu’il sait que ce dernier transgresse la loi colonized/colonizer. Donal and his fellow en mettant la seconde épouse de son père dans Republicans regard their fathers as traitors to son lit qu’il incite le narrateur à réaliser ses désirs jusqu’au bout … Du reste, à l’instar du the Irish cause for having supported the Free vieux Mahon de la pièce de Synge ou des mâles State, and thus in part allying themselves with estropiés de O’Casey et de Beckett, les the colonizer. Betrayal as a leitmotif implies a mutilations du corps paternel sont betrayal of fathers, a betrayal of sons, and a symptomatiques de ses nombreuses carences. betrayal of each other’s causes. Donal feels his Ces pseudo-héros que sont les géniteurs se father has betrayed Ireland, so he betrays him; voient singulièrement faibles, ou plus then, both of them betray the other and their exactement affaiblis, terrassés par la maladie ou mother/wife by falling in love with Rose. la vieillesse (Cardin 2005: 104-114). A rhetoric of betrayal is established and is Paradoxically, Sam’s metaphoric castration maintained by reiterated acts of betrayal. In makes it possible for him to enjoy a new addition, Donal’s reflection on his acts of emotional bond with his son. Nonetheless, this betrayal offers a clear explanation of the possibility exists only by virtue of the leitmotif at the core of Sunrise with Sea ‘castration’ it requires. This castration Monster: “Maybe the sins of fathers are visited designates Donal to a relationship no longer on their sons.” (62). What may be stressed is based on silence [“And I think as I walk that it that by betraying the enemy (England), Donal is strangely comforting to be with him and not also betrays his father and by ‘betraying’ have to listen. To have him beyond all Ireland, Sam betrays Donal. However, neither argument. The wind rises a little and whips his of the two can account for their choices and scarf backwards so it strokes my face. And that behaviour towards the other. Nor can they tell is all the contact I need.” (89)]. Moreover, the which act of betrayal is most inevitable. As a new state of mind leads to an unpaired son, Donal is aware of his having achieved all domesticity, with a reversal of the father’s and that is expected of any son of the son’s roles. Sam is like a “great immobile Nation/Ireland, and that it is something written child” (101); Donal is the household master. in his nature as in everyone else’s: “I can see The repetition of the term “child” enhances the myself as Judas, he who betrays because he reversal of roles: “He’ll sleep now. / How can dimly perceives that was all that was expected you tell? / He has his habits, like any child. of him.”; in other words, he belonged to a Help me.” (109). / “Like a child, it seemed, people who “having exhausted the litany of each new turn of the rails intimated a different betrayal at home, sought new possibilities world.” (116) / “like a child … as the child he abroad.” (16). At the end of this Chinese box- seemed to be.” (129) / “He was like a child narrative, Donal will finally acknowledge his between us, following our movements with his inability to perform any action unless it implies eyes, waiting on our ministrations” / “He an act of betrayal [“Who are you betraying? seemed sweet, like a child that completed our (…) / Just about everyone, I said. (…)” (123)] presence, the child we didn’t have.” (130-1). (Moller 2000: 7-8). So does the use of the adjective “familiar” Donal’s return to Ireland follows his father’s (which in Jordan’s use seems to mean either stroke, which leaves him with no power of ‘habitual’ or/and ‘familial’ in a number of speech. This situation brings forth a new state 109 warped reflection of one, but at least a family. littéraire’ des jeunes auteurs contemporains. Cet (…) his now familiar dinner of smoked héritage littéraire est parfois pesant pour la mackerel”), underlining Donal’s renewed jeune génération, dans la mesure où il lui est possibility of enjoying the pleasures of the difficile de trouver sa singularité, de se home. Even more contradictory is the fact that démarquer de ses prédécesseurs. (Cardin 2005: 164). the family as an institution is no longer viewed as a cage as it had been before. A Night in Tunisia and Other Stories was Again, Lisdoonvarna is the mythical ‘return- first published in 1976 and later re-issued after to-origins’ site. Here, Donal’s father disappears it was awarded the “Guardian Fiction Prize” in into the sea – an event which may either be 1979. Jordan’s stories are full of interpreted as a miracle performed by the water autobiographical references. In an interview he or as the fulfilment of his suicidal tendencies, gave to an Irish public soon after his decision for he knows there is no room for him in the to start a parallel career as director and ‘new family’. Having lost his father, Donal screenwriter, he pointed out that cannot contribute to the creation of a quiet The stories in ‘Night in Tunisia’ are all family life with Rose. It is as if their mutual autobiographical, not in the sense of people I love had been strengthened by Donal’s betrayal knew, or events that happened, but they’re of his father. And because he also cannot leave strictly photo-realistic. I found that I began to his own past behind, he revives his and his write inventive stories, fiction, but I could never father’s practice of laying fishing nightlines: write about people I knew, and I could rarely use the first person singular, the word ‘I’. But I “Some days (…) I would look at the catch, see almost always had to describe something that I the dark shape of a porbeagle or dolphin had seen (Toíbín 1982: 14). among the slapping silver and imagine for a Textual and visual elements overlap in Night moment that I had caught him, his body having 7 made the long journey home, the way salmon in Tunisia . The main theme is sexual do” (175) (see also Cardin 2005). The sea discovery in the early teens. Most of the stories monster at the end of the novel is a mythical are set in Dublin and its surroundings, revision with fantastic and surreal especially the local bathing towns such as Bray connotations. The monster is “outsize and (where the author still lives today). Father-son majestic … outlandish”; after it, Donal’s father relationships are another recurring theme in the emerges out of the water, “Through the collection. However, the theme is subjected to accident of fishing, I had brought him back, I rather different and often contradictory knew, from whatever place he had inhabited.” alternative representations as compared to (186). Such an ending seems yet again to stress Jordan’s later literary and film productions. the theme of reconciliation which characterises The father-son private sphere, on the other Jordan’s most accomplished fiction. hand, is always characterised by de Valera’s ghost as a representation of the father of the Father-son struggles in Night in Tunisia and whole Nation. Other Stories “Mr Solomon Wept” is the story of an Any analysis of Neil Jordan’s short stories archetypal, middle-aged and unattractive must take into account his role within the drunken father unable to cope with his young traditional Irish literary genre par excellence. son or to understand or respond to social Joyce’s legacy (in Dubliners) to the changes that have been taking place around contemporary short story in Ireland is him. His wife has left him for another, something every contemporary Irish author presumably younger, man: “He remembered writing short-stories must face and come to how his wife had left him on race day, one year terms with. Jordan and his contemporaries ago. (…) How on the fourth day he had gone to have somehow had to cope with that. Facing the caravan behind the rifle-range and found it the traditional genre may have been doubly empty, a note on the flap table. Its message hard for them, as it implies facing both their was hardly legible, though simple. Gone with literary fathers and their own fiction. Cardin Chas. Won’t have to hate you any more.” (34-5) has examined how Joyce relates to issues of ______fatherhood in the Irish literary tradition: 7. Night in Tunisia, Bloomsbury, London 2004: all Joyce serait, en quelque sorte, l’initiateur de la bibliographical references in square brackets refer révolte du narrateur contre son père dans le to this edition. roman d’initiation irlandais et donc le ‘père 110

Interestingly enough, his loss suddenly turns to Some day soon, he sang, I’m going to tell the “the loss of what he had never possessed” (35). Moon about the crying game. And maybe he’ll The failure of all marriage relationships explain, he sang.” (47)8. The father’s ability to introduced in this and other texts by Jordan play the saxophone accounts for the son’s may then be read as a prelude to the need for a achievement of sexual maturity later in the re-assessment of social structures in a global narrative. In other words, a symbolic passage context, like Ireland during the 1970s-1980s. of power takes place from father to son – and Mr Solomon spends all his days drinking what is more, it is the son who takes whiskey and as victim of his son’s possession of his father’s power: “he fashioned disrespectful behaviour: his mouth round the reed till the sounds he He could only stare, at (…) his thin made became like a power of speech, a speech impenetrable face. At his son’s face, new to him that his mouth was the vehicle for but that because he’d never seen it. He made to move sprang from the knot of his stomach, the crook towards him, only then realising how drunk he of his leg. (…) He imagined childhood falling was. He saw the boy’s hand draw back and an from him, coming off his palms like scales object fly from it. He raised his hand to protect from a fish” (62-3). Such use of an instrument his face and felt something strike his knuckles. and its metaphoric connotations diverges He heard the coin ring off the cement floor and significantly from what Jordan does in Angel. the boy’s footsteps running towards the door. There, we are shown Danny’s substitution of He ran after him drunkenly, shouting. (39-40) his saxophone with a gun to avenge Annie and During a fair held on the beach, he is forced his friend, both of whom brutally murdered. to realise that he has failed in all respects as a Thus, Danny picks up an instrument of terror father. The story closes on his stumbling (the gun) to assert his maleness (see Kearney drunkenly on the beach, then falling face down 1988d). Whereas in “Night in Tunisia”, the on the sand only to hear his son laughing drunken father spends every day in bed waiting pitifully at him from a distance: “He lifted his for the time to get up and go with his friends to face and wept in the sand … He heard a loud the bar to play. Never does he lose sight of his cheer, somewhere beyond him” (41). instrument; he apparently loves it more than he Jordan’s treatment of imperfect father-son loves his own son [“The boy he’d known relationships in “Night in Tunisia” and “A lifelong, old and somewhat loved, but not like Love” is even more extreme. “Night in his Selmer, shining.” (49)]. And, through the Tunisia” is set in the countryside around the sound of the saxophone, he re-takes possession River Boyne (the setting of Jordan’s last novel, of the remnants of his power within the home, Shade, published in 2005). The story is about which in turn his son undermines. As the two an adolescent and his love for a grown-up girl of them listen together to a song, the father who is rumoured by the townspeople to be a begs his son to one day play with him: prostitute. Both of them have a drunken father. “If you’d let me teach you,” his father said, But, the protagonist’s father is an amateur “you’d be glad later on.” / “Then why not wait saxophonist whose main ambition is to play till later on and teach me then.” / “Because with friends in a local bar. His hatred for new you’re young, you’re at the age. You’ll never musical tendencies grows with his realisation learn as well as now, if you let me teach you. that he cannot really cope with them: “there You’ll never feel things like you do now.” / He was no more place for brassmen like him in the began playing again in defiance and then world of three-chord showbands. (…) the alto stopped. / “I’ll pay you,” his father said. (60) saxophone which his father said he could learn Soon, the son grabs the saxophone and starts to when he forgot his fascination for three-chord play. His father approaches him and shows him ditties. With the guitar which he played a lot, how to place his fingers on the keys; this as if in spite against the alto saxophone.” (44). episode gives him a pleasure which is Again, the influence of music – which Jordan “tangible, cogent.” (62) – for it reverberates explores extensively in his first feature film, ______Angel – is questioned. In this case, the father 8. The line “Some day soon (…) I’m going to tell makes great efforts to teach his son to play the the Moon about the crying game” is a verse of the saxophone; by contrast, the son spends his well-known soundtrack to The Crying Game. This whole days listening to the same music his may be a further reference to Jordan’s attention to father hates: “But he felt vengeful and played music in all his novels, short stories and films. (it) incessantly and even sang the tawdry lyrics 111 with his father’s realisation that his role is over his father had struggled vainly to ‘conquer’. He and that he is now handing it down to his son. had won, “And all the time for me there was The father-son contrast is mirrored by the my father lying underneath, cold most likely, relationship between old and young and awake and I wanted him to hear the beast I generations as the main theme of “A Love”. “A was creating with you, I wanted to hear it Love” tells of two ex-lovers who meet again scratching, creaking through to him from after a long time, importantly on the day of de above, for your body was like the woman he Valera’s funeral. At first, de Valera, a must have loved to have me (…) you could multifarious and often contradictory character have been anyone’s mother” (99). In a is just “the president who had died” – this, at variation upon the reconciliation theme, Neil least, from the point of view of the young attempts something none of Jordan’s ‘sons’ protagonist, Neil9. On one level, Jordan usually do: he tries to shoot his father. His recounts Neil’s love story with the woman, far father is locked in the bathroom – significantly, older than himself; on the other, he a situation where he is defenceless. The story strategically associates every moment of their ends with a variation on the sea metaphor relationship with a different memory each of common to all of Jordan’s texts examined so them has of the hero: “I remember you talking far (probably, a further reference to the ‘return about him and I thought of how we would have to origins’ motif). The sea anticipates Neil’s two different memories of him” (95). The recovery of his own past, followed by his memories, in turn, influence their attitudes realisation that “I (…) saw him for the first towards life in general: for Neil, what is part of time not as my father who wrote equations on the past (his and the Nation’s) must be left sheets of paper into the night and knew a lot behind. In a later passage, he sees de Valera’s about things like sea-shells but as someone picture and suddenly remembers about the time young and agile who had the same yearning for he spent in London. This was when he had you as I had.” (110-11). This means that the voluntarily undergone ‘exile’ to escape the theme of reconciliation has been accomplished harshness of living in a country (Ireland) stuck once again and once and for all. in its own past: The memories of two different fathers – I had no memory of him other than from Neil’s and the Nation’s (de Valera) – are photographs and then only a big nose and exchanged until the moment when on glancing bulging eyes and spectacles but I knew you out of the window of a pub where he’s been would be changed and I knew I was changed sitting with his ex-lover, Neil is struck by the and I wanted to stop thinking about it (…) the way the national hero (and, maybe, all man who had died, he had been the centre of the narratives of Ireland’s past) appears to him in school textbooks, his angular face and his all his contradictions: “I felt I was watching an thirties collar and his fist raised in a gesture of animal dying through the plate-glass window, defiance towards something out there, beyond an animal that was huge, murderous, the rim of the brown photograph, never defined. And I wondered whether I’d rather be out of contradictory and I looked up at your face,(…) step here or in step in London, where the again at he funeral of the man I didn’t passions are rational. (97) remember, the man you would have remembered.” (102). If it is true that, as Neil’s Flashbacks of the love story alternate with lover tells him, one cannot really understand those of the father-son conflict, and their Ireland unless they have ever journeyed to the sharing the love for the same woman. Neil West (105), it is also true that Neil, and his remembers the ecstasy and rapture he felt in his generation of ‘youth of today’, can consider de bedroom with his former lover. But he finds it Valera’s/the fathers’ ghosts as multi-layered even more pleasurable to remember how great characters to be rejected. What is all the more an ecstasy it was to know, then, that he was important is that the sons can finally and slowly, firmly taking possession of someone clearly comprehend “the nation that was begun ______(…) by de Valera’s notions of what Ireland 9. A parallelism may be made between Neil as the should be.» (Winarski 1999: 103). This seems story’s protagonist and Neil Jordan himself, given to be what Neil Jordan himself has come to the particular interest of the author for acknowledge. autobiographical references in his works. Nonetheless, no mention of this is given in any of My gratitude to John Gilbert and Christine Jordan’s critical work or in his interviews. Richardson for their generous advice. 112

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